September 19, 2008

First, I want to clarify that I am not talking about load balancing radius authentications. This post is strictly for setting up a load balancer to use radius for authenticating users who wish to gain access to the device via SSH (port 22) and HTTPS (port 443).

First, if you are primarily using the GUI, this document won't help ya. When making changes via GUI inline with command line updates, problems occur. Configuration settings may not successfully load (sometimes). Kind of a weird issue. F5 support even suggests avoiding this.

I am assuming that the load balancer already has access to the remote server that will provide authentication. Meaning, the interfaces and routes are configured correctly (as well as the RADIUS server itself).

So, with that said, here's what ya need to setup radius authentication. You can either edit the bigip.conf file directly, or simply use the bigpipe command for steps 1 and 2. For those of you who are wondering, the 'b' command is short for bigpipe. if you enter bigpipe by itself in command line, you'll get a list of all commands available.